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![]() Germany's eugenics controversy
Will Germany embrace scientific advances in IVF?
As part of a programme examining Europe's commitment to Dignity - as enshrined in the Charter of Fundamental Rights - Edward Stourton examines the bioethics debate taking place in Germany.
Contemporary German society is in the throes of a debate about life and death. A dark chapter of the 20th century has come back to haunt the very 21st century public discussion that is currently taking place in Germany on the subject of bioethics. The debate is focused around an awe-inspiringly delicate technique of reproductive medicine called PGD - pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. Working with an artificially fertilised embryo which would be invisible to the naked eye, embryologists remove one cell so that its genetic make-up can be tested.
But in Germany is it illegal - largely because of the folk memory of the Nazis and their eugenics programme.
Webcast Wednesday 1400 GMT:
Hereditary Health Courts In the 1930s the Nazis established what were called Hereditary Health Courts, panels with the power to order the sterilisation of individuals they felt were genetically inadequate. The decision-making process was arbitrary in the extreme and had no basis in real science and before long, it was followed by a programme of extermination of people judged unfit members of the German race - the mentally ill or disabled, for example. Like the moment of selection between those who would live and those who would die when people arrived at Auschwitz, the eugenics programme was based on the conviction that it is possible to make judgements about the quality of a human life.
Great benefit
Patients have to go abroad if they want to receive the treatment - it is legal in most of the rest of Europe - and there are plenty of people in Germany who believe that position is becoming more and more difficult to maintain in a European Union. The doctors' campaign has coincided with a more general debate about whether Germany should be so much a prisoner of its past that it retreats from the opportunity of real progress. Opponents of legalisation
They argue that PGD could deprive other parents of the joy they have found in bringing up their disabled child. "Germany," Meike's father told us, "is a burdened country. We should be careful even to think about starting a discussion on this matter."
Ambulance to the future:
Reporter: Edward Stourton
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